‘Whatever does it mean?’ I cried.
‘Simply that someone does not wish us involved.’
‘In the Davenoke case?’
‘So we must suppose; I am engaged in no other inquiry at present.’
‘But who?’
Holmes shook his head, his brows drawn down into a frown of concentration. ‘The letter bears an ‘E.C.’ postmark,’ said he.
‘It was posted in the City, then!’
‘Precisely, Watson, precisely!’
‘The writing is exceedingly untidy,’ I remarked, ‘which perhaps indicates an ill-educated person.’
‘I think not,’ returned my friend. ‘The letters are strong, firm and regularly formed. They quite lack the artificial and unnecessary flourishes with which the ill-educated feel obliged to decorate their script. In addition, the grammar is impeccable and the choice of words precise. It is apparent that whoever sent this note is no stranger to the art of writing.’
‘What then?’ I asked in surprise.
‘He is a reasonably well educated man – for a man’s hand it surely is – who was simply in a very great hurry when he wrote this note.’
‘Why should he be in a hurry?’
At this, Sherlock Holmes broke into one of those strange, noiseless bouts of laughing which were peculiar to him. ‘Perhaps,’ said he at length, ‘he had a train to catch.’
For the remainder of the day my friend did not once refer to Lady Davenoke’s mystery. In the afternoon he went out for an hour or two, returning with a small brown-paper package, which he placed upon his desk and did not open. All evening he occupied himself with some particularly malodorous chemical experiment, the air of our little room gradually thickening to an unhealthy reek, until I was at length driven to my bedroom by the noxious fumes. As I left the room I bade my friend good night, but he was engrossed over a bubbling retort and did not hear me. It was evident to me that he had deliberately concentrated his mind upon other matters since the morning, in order to drive the Davenoke case completely from his thoughts, that he might return to it afresh and with renewed mental energies at a later date. As I have had occasion to remark elsewhere, Holmes’s powers of mental detachment in such circumstances were quite extraordinary. Perhaps, I reflected as I climbed the stairs, he would return to the matter in the morning, if the letter he was expecting from Lady Davenoke arrived then.
We were seated at breakfast the following day when the maid brought up the post. Eagerly my friend sifted through the envelopes with his long thin fingers, selected two and put the rest aside. He tore open the first, glanced briefly inside and tossed it across to me. I was most surprised to see that it contained nothing at all. From the second he extracted a large, folded blue sheet, which he spread out upon his plate and studied closely for several minutes, a frown upon his face, before passing it to me. It was in the neat, rounded hand of Lady Davenoke and ran as follows:
MY DEAR MR SHERLOCK HOLMES,
I was most surprised to receive your letter, which arrived this morning. Your queries are easily answered however: Edward has not returned, but all else at Shoreswood is as it should be, and all the staff were present when Miss Strensall and I returned. I had wired ahead to say when we should arrive and Staples met us at the station with the trap, Mrs Pybus had prepared a meal for us, and I believe I saw everyone else at some time or another soon after our return. As for Hardwick, he was the very first person we met upon our return, for he was at the railway station at the same time as we were. He had just returned on the up train from Yoxford, a village which lies some miles to the north, where he had spent the day visiting his brother, who has been ill lately. He travelled back in the trap with us to Shoreswood. Miss Strensall found that journey a delight. She has now established herself satisfactorily in her bedroom and I have moved upstairs, so that our rooms can be next to each other. I am very much looking forward to enjoying her companionship in the days ahead.
However, to leave all this for the moment, I must tell you my one thoroughly splendid piece of news: When your letter arrived this morning it was not alone, but came accompanied by a letter from my husband! You will appreciate how thrilled I was when I recognised his handwriting upon the envelope. Is not life strange in its odd and unpredictable arrangement of events! It seems that all my worries will soon be at an end. But I will let you judge for yourself and copy down here for you the relevant parts of my husband’s letter:
‘MY DEAR AMELIA,
How sorry I am not to have written sooner to you. Please forgive me, but I have been ill for some days with megrim and have scarcely left my bed. Prior to that I was so completely occupied in settling certain outstanding matters of my father’s that I had energy left for nothing else. I believe now, however, that my task is nearly complete and that I shall soon be returning to Shoreswood – and to you, my sweet.
‘You will observe that there is no address at the head of this letter. I decided when I arrived in London that I would not stay at the Royal Suffolk on this occasion but at a smaller hotel. Unfortunately, this has proved less than satisfactory, so I shall be moving this afternoon. I am therefore without an address at present and you will thus not, I am afraid, be able to write to me. Save up all your news until I come home.
EDWARD’
I think you will agree, Mr Holmes, that that is good news indeed! I feel quite foolish to have allowed myself to become so distraught. My heart is so much lighter now. However, I shall certainly do as you requested and keep you informed of all that occurs here from now on.
YOURS SINCERELY, AMELIA DAVENOKE
‘Well, Watson, what do you make of it?’ enquired Holmes, as he poured himself a cup of coffee.
‘It seems the very best news your client could have hoped for,’ I replied. ‘No doubt the matter will soon resolve itself now. It is good that Lady Davenoke is now so cheerful.’
‘Oh? So that is how it strikes you?’ said he, passing me the toast-rack. He pushed back his chair in silence and took his coffee cup to the mantelpiece, where he set it down amid a litter of chemical bottles and test-tubes, and took up his black clay pipe.
‘I regret that I cannot share your optimism, Watson,’ he continued after a moment. ‘You will appreciate that I feel professionally responsible for the well-being of my client. From that point of view, this letter she has received is perhaps the most sinister development so far.’
‘You amaze me, Holmes! It struck me as extremely cheering!’
‘So are fairy-tales, Watson – and they contain as much of the truth as does that letter.’
‘Really, Holmes! What possible evidence can you have for such an assertion?’
‘The most significant evidence lies in the first envelope I passed you.’
‘But that envelope was perfectly empty!’
‘Therein lies its significance.’
‘Oh, this is absurd!’ I cried. ‘I can make neither head nor tail of it!’
‘You know my methods,’ said he laconically. ‘Apply them!’
I picked the empty envelope up from the table and examined it. It was very cheap, penny-a-packet commercial stationery, and bore the previous evening’s date and the ‘E.C.’ postmark, indicating that it had been posted in the City area. I remarked as much to my friend and he nodded.
‘Your name and address are correctly rendered,’ I continued, ‘but the writing is very scratchy, indicating perhaps that the writer is careless with his pen, or too mean to fit a fresh nib when one is undoubtedly needed. The writing itself, however, has a certain strength and regularity. It is the hand, I should say, of a man of character and intelligence.’
‘Thank you!’ cried my friend, choking with laughter and collapsing helplessly into a chair. I looked again at the envelope. ‘Holmes!’ I cried, ‘this hand is your own! You yourself wrote it!’
‘Indeed I did,’ said he when he had recovered himself. ‘I wrote it in a post office and the pen was the best one available, I am afraid.’
‘I am g
lad you find your own jest so amusing,’ I remarked with some asperity. ‘I was under the impression that we were engaged upon a serious investigation.’
‘So we are, my dear fellow, so we are,’ said he. His tone was an earnest one, but this served only to irritate me further.
‘You go too far, Holmes,’ said I coldly. ‘You send yourself a letter with nothing in it, open it up and gaze at its emptiness, then pronounce the matter to be of significance. It is significant only of idiocy!’
‘There you make a mistake, my dear friend.’
‘I think not.’
‘But you do, nonetheless. Your mistake is in supposing that I sent the letter to myself. That, I agree, would be idiocy.’
‘But you have admitted as much.’
‘Not at all. I admitted only that I wrote the address upon the letter, and you leapt to the conclusion that I also sent it. As these actions do go together as a general rule, the conclusion is, I admit, a natural one; but it by no means follows with apodictic certainty. The two actions are really quite distinct, a fact which I feel may be of considerable significance in the Davenoke case. But, come! I have no desire to make further mystery when there is so much already. Do you recall the Baker Street Division of the Detective Force?’
‘The Irregulars! Most certainly,’ said I, smiling at the thought, despite myself. ‘A more dishevelled and disreputable collection of street-Arabs I never saw in my life!’
‘Nevertheless, there is much good work to be got from them. You will no doubt recall the assistance they provided in the Jefferson Hope case, and also in that singular business of “The Three Eyes”.’
‘I am hardly likely to forget either of those cases. You are employing them at present, then?’
‘Precisely, Watson. As I informed you the other day, I myself made inquiries for Sir Edward Davenoke at virtually all the conceivable places. The Baker Street Irregulars are therefore trying all the inconceivable places – small hotels, many of them distinctly disreputable, cheap lodging houses, odd rooms that are let in public-houses and so on. I provided their leader, Wiggins, with a ready-stamped envelope, for him to communicate his findings to me – I addressed it myself, as writing is not Wiggins’s strong suit – in order that we should not have the house invaded by these boys, as has happened before – much to Mrs Hudson’s distress, as you will no doubt recollect. But if, and only if, he was certain that they had looked everywhere, and that there was nowhere remaining where Davenoke might be, he was to seal up the envelope, empty as it was, and send it back to me, to let me know that they had completed their task, and that Davenoke was nowhere to be found. Such a negative message is every bit as interesting and important, you see, as any positive message could be. Knowing the thoroughness with which Wiggins and his friends have always performed the tasks I have set them, I can thus declare with a confidence approaching almost to certainty that the letter which Amelia Davenoke has received is nothing more nor less than a monstrous lie.’
‘What, then, do you see as the truth?’
‘This is not the time to discuss theories,’ replied Holmes after a moment. ‘I am not yet entirely clear in my mind about one or two points. One thing that does seem clear to me, however, is that the arrival of this letter is bad – very bad. It rather eliminates the possibility that this whole business is a series of accidents, unfortunate mischances and misapprehensions, and renders it virtually certain that things are as I feared. All that had happened to this point was vague and inconclusive, and susceptible of some innocent explanation or other, however unlikely: thus, the man we saw in the street may indeed have been hurrying to visit his dentist, and the fact that his cab followed Lady Davenoke’s so closely may have been sheer chance; the anonymous note we received may have come from some crank or monomaniac who has no connection with the Davenokes whatever – it did not mention any names after all – and the fact that it came when it did may be utter coincidence; the figure Lady Davenoke saw upon the lawn may indeed have been a poacher, the lights some natural phenomenon, the footsteps in the night a servant sneaking to the kitchen for a slice of bread and cheese. But this letter she has received’ – he paused to give emphasis to his words – ‘this letter, I say, is a concrete, physical lie, which can in no wise be explained away.’
‘I see clearly now what you mean,’ said I. ‘But what can we do?’
‘We might do worse than read the book I picked up at Hatchard’s, yesterday afternoon,’ replied my friend. ‘It is always an advantage to understand fully the historical antecedents of a case.’
He took up the brown-paper packet which had lain unopened upon his desk and extracted a red-bound volume. As he turned the pages over, I saw that it was Robinson’s County Guide to East Suffolk. After a moment, he found what he was looking for.
‘“Shoreswood Old Hall, its history and legend”,’ he read aloud. ‘I shall give you a résumé of the history, Watson, and perhaps when you have finished your work with that egg-spoon you would be so good as to read the section devoted to the legend.’
‘Certainly, if it is of interest to you.’
‘“The manor of Shoreswood is one of the oldest in the country,”’ he began after a moment, ‘ “and has many historical associations. It has been the home of the Davenoke family since the middle of the fourteenth century, for a pipe roll of 1347, in the reign of Edward III, records that one Guy Davernuck was granted the manor of ‘Shorriswode’ in recognition of the service he had rendered the king at the battle of Crécy, the previous year. In the fifteenth century the Davenokes were closely associated with the Pole family, supporting the claims of the latter to” – this is not very interesting! Let me see – Ah! “At the time of the Reformation, the family remained faithful to the Church of Rome, but although their sympathies were widely known, they appear to have escaped any great penalty upon this account. Later, Roland Davenoke was one of the leading supporters of Mary Tudor’s successful claim upon the throne, he being largely responsible for the rallying of English Catholics at nearby Framlingham Castle, from where she marched to London to take the Crown. When Elizabeth became queen, the Davenokes were several times fined for recusancy, and for many years the estate lay under threat of confiscation, but the threat was never enacted. Elizabeth’s officers visited Shoreswood on many occasions, acting on persistent rumours that Jesuit priests from France were in hiding there, but none was ever discovered.
‘“At the time of the Civil War, Robert Davenoke took the Royalist side and was killed at the Battle of Naseby, fighting alongside Prince Rupert. A tradition in the area has it that the future King Charles II spent a night at Shoreswood after the Battle of Worcester, on his way into exile abroad.” – Ha! – If Charles II had indeed stayed a night in every place which lays a claim to harbouring him after the Battle of Worcester, he would never have found time to get abroad at all! What else do we have? Hum! – “In 1738, during the time of Sir Charles, the first baronet, a completely new house was begun three miles away, in the Palladian style then popular. The original house was thence known as ‘Shoreswood Old Hall’, in contradistinction to the new. So poorly was the new hall constructed, however, that within a dozen years it had become unsafe for habitation and within two dozen the greater part of it was in ruins. Having insufficient capital to effect the necessary repairs, the family moved back to the Old Hall, where they have remained ever since.”
‘There is little more of interest,’ said Holmes, his eye running down the page. ‘Ah! Amelia Davenoke is not alone in her dislike of the place. Apparently, David Hume, the philosopher, spent a night there in 1766 and described it afterwards, in a letter to Adam Smith, as “the most repugnant household in which a man was ever required to endure twenty-four hours”. Hum! The chapel seems to have had a history almost as chequered as that of the Davenokes themselves. Parts of it are Norman, including one wall which still stands. Listen to this, Watson! – “It was partly destroyed at the Reformation, partly restored under Mary Tudor, forcibly closed during Elizabet
h’s long reign, and brought to its present state of ruin by Cromwell’s myrmidons, since when it has been left to moulder in picturesque decay.” What a wealth of history that sentence comprises! But I see that you are ready now to take over!’
My friend passed me the book, settled himself in his chair and put a match to his pipe, as I began the following singular account:
The legend associated with the Manor of Shoreswood, and hence with the family of Davenoke, is among the most remarkable of English folk-tales, containing as it does certain unique features which set it apart from other, similar legends. Yet it has, also, something in common with all such tales, in that it purports to record events which we feel reluctant to credit, but which were apparently well-attested by those present at the time.
Belief in a hidden chamber in Shoreswood Hall, and in a mysterious local creature, unlike any known animal, were both part of the common coin of rural folklore throughout the recorded history of the area. But the two beliefs appear to have been quite distinct and unconnected until the early years of the seventeenth century, during the reign of James I, when there occurred, so it is said, those events which were to forge an inseparable link between them in the popular imagination, and give to the creature the name of the Beast of Shoreswood. It was a dark and superstitious age, between the brash and confident gaiety of the Tudors and the harsh and bitter divisions of the Civil War; a fitting time, one might suppose, for a monster to stalk the shadowed lanes of the Deben valley, striking terror into the hearts of the simple country-folk who dwelt there.
As to the accuracy of the following we can make no claim. It is largely taken from what is probably the best account, that of one Thomas Swefling, a minor tax-official in the area at the time. As he did not set himself to record the events until twenty years after their occurrence, however, his account may contain many errors, which must, of necessity, be repeated here.
The Mammoth Book of the New Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes Page 40